Tag Archives: 65mm

FotoKem worked to keep Christopher Nolan’s 65mm source natively photochemical and to provide the truest-to-film digital cinema version possible

By Adrian Pennington

Tipped for Oscar glory, Christopher Nolan’s intense World War II masterpiece, Dunkirk, has pushed the boundaries further than any film before it. Having shot sequences of his previous films (including Interstellar) on IMAX, this time the director made the entire picture on 65mm negative. Approximately 75% of the film was captured on 65mm/15-perf IMAX (1.43:1) and the rest on 65mm/5-perf (2.2:1) on Panavision cameras.

Christopher Nolan on set.

Nolan’s vision and passion for the true film experience was carried out by Burbank-based FotoKem in what became the facility’s biggest and most complex large format project to date. In addition to the array of services that went into creating two 65mm master negatives and 70mm release prints in both 15p and 5p formats, FotoKem also provided the movie’s DCP deliverables based on in-house color science designed to match the film master. With the unique capability to project 70mm film (on a Century JJ projector) side by side with the digital projection of 65mm scans, FotoKem meticulously replicated the organic film look shot by Hoyte van Hoytema, ASC, NSC, FSF, and envisioned by Nolan.

In describing the large format film process, Andrew Oran, FotoKem’s VP of large format services, explains, “Hoyte was in contact with FotoKem’s Dan Muscarella (the movie’s color timer) throughout production, providing feedback on the 70mm contact and 35mm reduction dailies being screened on location. The pipeline was devised so that the IMAX (65mm/15p) footage was timed on a customized 65mm Colormaster by FotoKem color timer Kristen Zimmermann, under Muscarella’s supervision. Her timing lights were provided to IMAX Post, who used those for producing 35mm reduction prints. Those prints were screened in Los Angeles by IMAX, Muscarella and editorial, who in turn provided feedback to production on location. Prints and files travelled securely back and forth between FotoKem and IMAX throughout each day by in-house delivery personnel and via FotoKem’s proprietary globalDATA e-delivery platform.”

A similar route was taken for the Panavision (65mm/5p) footage — also under Muscarella’s keen eye — prior to FotoKem producing 70mm/5p contact daily prints. A set of both prints (35mm and 70mm) were transported for screening in a trailer on location 50,000 miles away in England, France (including shooting on Dunkirk beach itself) and The Netherlands. Traveling with editorial during principal photography was a 70mm projector on which editor Lee Smith, ACE, and Nolan could view dailies in 70mm/5 perf. A 35mm Arri LocPro was also used to watch reduction prints on location.

Oran adds, “Zimmermann also applied color timing lights to the 65mm/5p negatives for contact printing to 70mm at FotoKem. Ultimately, prints from every reel of film negative in both formats were screened by Dan at FotoKem before shipping to production. This way, Dan ensured that the color was as Nolan and Hoytema envisioned. Later, the goal for the DCP was to give the audience the same feel as if they were watching the film version.”

HD deliverables for editorial and studio viewing were created on a customized Millennium telecine. Warner Bros. and Nolan required the quality be high at this step of the process — which can be challenging for 65mm formats. To do this, FotoKem made improvements to the 65mm Millennium telecine machine’s optical and light path, and fed the scans through a custom keycode and metadata workflow in the company’s nextLAB media management platform. Scans for the film’s digital cinema mastering were done at 8K on FotoKem’s Imagica 65mm scanners.

Then, to produce the DCPs, FotoKem’s principal color scientist, Joseph Slomka, says, “We created color modeling tools using the negative, interpositive and print process to match the digital image to the film as precisely as technically possible. We sat down with film prints and verified that the modeling data matched a printed original negative in our DI suite with side by side projection.”

Walter Volpatto

This is where FotoKem colorist Walter Volpatto says he determined “how much” and “how close” to match the colors. “We did this by using a special machine — called a Harrahscope Minimax Comparator Projector, developed by Mark Harrah and on loan from the Walt Disney Studios — to project still IMAX frames on the screen,” Volpatto elaborates. “We did this for 400 images from the movie and looked at single frames of digital (projected from a Barco 4K DLP) versus film from Harrahscope, and compared, using the data created by the modeling tools.”

Volpatto worked mainly with RGB offsets in Resolve after each single frame verification to maintain a similarity to traditional color timing. “We also modified the DLP white point settings of the projector for purposes of maintaining the closest match,” he says. “Then, once all the tweaks were made with the stills, we moved to motion picture film reels. Everything described in the printer lights at the film stage were translated to digital based on modeling data.”

In addition to working with Dan (Muscarella) on the film screenings to see the quality he would need to match, Volpatto says that working on Interstellar also helped inform him how to approach this process. “It’s about getting the look that Nolan wants — I just had to replicate it with tremendous accuracy on Dunkirk.”

Joseph Slomka

Aside from the standard DCP, two further digital masters were created for distribution including IMAX scans and digital IMAX distribution, and a Dolby Digital Cinema HDR Master from same source material.

“For the Dolby pass, we had to create another set of color science tools — that still represented Nolan’s vision — to exactly replicate the look of film to HDR,” says Slomka. “Because we had all the computer modeling tools used earlier in the process to identify how the film behaved, we were able to build on that for the HDR version.”

Adds Volpatto, “The whole pipeline was designed to preserve the original viewing experience of print film – everything had to integrate purely and unnoticeably. Having this film and color science knowledge here at FotoKem, it’s hard to see that anybody else could achieve what we did at this level.”

Who doesn’t love The Sound of Music? Who? Introduce them to me and we’ll talk. Fifty years after it was released in theaters, this classic film about — well, you know what it’s about — was restored by Burbank’s Fotokem, home to one of the last feature film labs in the country. The studio completed the restoration of the 65mm musical through 8K scans from large-format film elements, downsampled to 4K for restoration and digital cinema mastering.

For the restoration of The Sound of Music, which was directed by Robert Wise and photographed by Ted D. McCord, ASC, Andrew Oran and his team began by creating the highest Continue reading →

During IBC 2014 in Amsterdam, I was offered the opportunity to sit down with Franz Kraus, managing director of Arri. There was some breaking news he was willing to share — a new camera that had been whispered about here and there on the show floor. This was one week before the Cinec show in Munich, where the camera company introduced its newest offering, the Alexa 65.

How could I turn down that kind of opportunity?! So I headed out of the RAI Convention Center, went straight into my “this is how a native New Yorker walks” mode and got to a neighboring hotel just in time to wipe my brow, put my handy iOgrapher iPad mini rig onto a tripod and hit record.

Los Angeles — For Arcade Fire’s new release the band commissioned Afterlife, a film directed by Emily Kai Bock and produced by The Creators Project (a partnership between Intel and VICE). The film is over seven minutes and features a journey through nightmares, lost loves, and family ties. (See it here: https://vimeo.com/79836732)

The film was shot on 65mm and 35mm by DP Evan Prosofsky and Cinelicious (www.cinelicious.tv) provided film scanning of the 35mm footage, all the, color services and 4K mastering. Fotokem scanned the 65mm footage.

For 35mm scanning Cineliciuos used Scanity 4K for 35mm. Fotokem (http://fotokem.com) used the Imagica Bigfoot 4K for 65mm. For color grading Cinelicious called on the 4K DaVinci Resolve and for 4K / Ultra HD monitoring employed the Barco 4Kp on Stewart Snomatte 100 Solid Screen with Rec709 calibration.

According to DP Prosofsky, “Emily and I wanted to make something that emphasized the narrative aspects of the music video by making the film look as cinematic as possible. For me, that meant shooting mainly on 35mm film motion picture film, and utilizing 65mm for certain moments. My hope was that giving the viewer the highest resolution imagery possible would ground the film in reality and avoid the cliche of grainy, sepia-toned dream imagery.”

Paul Korver, Cinelicious founder says, “Evan and Emily came to us and wanted to shoot a video on 35mm and 65mm. We love working with creatives that are not just going for ‘good enough’ but are dedicated reaching for the stars with their images and there’s no digital camera in the world that can touch a high resolution scan of 65mm viewed on a 4K display. It’s really rare to see 65mm used in anything but huge budget features, so it was refreshing to try to make large format film work for a creative, short-form project.”

The 35mm was scanned HDR on our Scanity and we supervised the 65mm selects scanning process with Andrew Oran at Fotokem, with final color by award winning colorist Robert Curreri in our 4K theater.”

A 4K master is yet-to-be released but Cinelicious has one available for 4K/UltraHD Television distribution.